In 2013 The Makira Forest REDD+ Project in northeast Madagascar, managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), became the first ever African project to put ‘Government-backed’ and ‘verified’ offsets for sale on the voluntary market, with 32 million tons of carbon predicted to be stored in the forest over thirty years, and over 700,000 carbon credits thus produced (WCS 2013). While portrayed as one of the first REDD+ success stories in the continent, its history has not been without controversy. Back in 2008, around the same time as WCS, in partnership with Conservation International (CI), sold Makira carbon offsets to rock band Pearl Jam for their ‘carbon neutral’ tour, social scientists carrying out research in the area were required by WCS to not mention ‘carbon’ or ‘REDD’ to communities lest they raised villagers’ expectations. As scientists entered the forest to measure the amount of carbon stored in trees, forest communities were kept in the dark to what was going on. Word eventually got out and as ‘carbon’
and ‘REDD’ made it into these rural contexts, local Betsimisaraka began to refer to it as ‘foreigners selling air/wind’, mivarotra rivotra ny vazaha.
Recently, a study (Brimont et al. 2015) assessing the impact of the project among these communities suggests that tavy farmers are the ones that have been affected the most, due to the restrictions on land use and expansion that have been imposed to ‘avoid deforestation’. Additionally, the majority of these farmers have been left out of the project’s development programme, since this has been mainly targeted at owners of permanent rice fields due to practical reasons. For tavy farmers, then, the sale of ‘air’ by the Makira Forest REDD+ has only translated into a decrease in the availability of farming land, with important consequences for present and future livelihoods.
In the last two chapters I explored one specific form, or social life, of
‘carbon’—the carbon credit—and its articulation with ideas of value and waste in the forests of Andasibe. Carbon, from this perspective, appeared as
a well-defined—even if hard-to-achieve—object, made up of very specific elements (additionality, baseline, etc.) embodied in the presence of reforested trees and animated by their imagined absence in the future as a result of tavy. From its credit form, I now move on to explore some of the more concrete and socially entangled lives of carbon in the landscapes of Andasibe and Mahatsara. It is at this stage that carbon begins to lose some stability.
The story of the Makira Forest REDD+ Project offers apt examples of the shapes that carbon takes in the next two chapters. As we will see, when carbon enters rural contexts and is experienced by farmers, it loses some of its coherence as a single object with ‘clearly identified boundaries’ (Lien and Law 2011:67), sometimes even disappearing from view. Thus, we saw that as natural resource produced in the Makira forest for international markets, carbon could be made visible to scientists while remaining invisible to local people. Once it entered local landscapes and imaginaries, in turn, it was as elusive and dispersed as the ‘air’—hard to know about and locate. As the experience of tavy farmers in Makira shows us, finally, carbon may even fail to materialise in any recognizable form, its presence only palpable through a new set of restrictions on land access imposed by outside actors that limit people’s abilities to secure a livelihood.
In the next two chapters I will focus on the social lives of carbon in its unstable, elusive, or implicit forms in local lives and landscapes.
In chapter five I explore carbon in Mahatsara as an indistinguishable element of what I term the ‘environmental state’, experienced through spatial, and I will argue temporal, restrictions. As we will see, tavy is the pillar of social and material reproduction in Mahatsara, connecting people to their pasts, presents and futures. The impossibility to expand into new land due to conservation practice, and the consequences of being contained in space/time, have led to a constant feeling of being ‘squeezed’, voatery. This concept, I will argue, extends beyond its spatial and temporal connotations and articulates a broader commentary on local experiences of oppression
and power(lessness). Although carbon in this case is not explicitly talked about, it is implicit when farmers refer to the curtailment of movement, as carbon is inherently entangled with the practice of tavy in the interplay between agricultural expansion and the fixity of the carbon sink. I thus approach the social life of carbon in this chapter through the social and material relations of tavy.
In chapter six, on the other hand, I focus on the social life of carbon as natural resource through experiences of its extraction in Mahatsara, as I compare it to other sources of work and resources that have been present in these landscapes historically. As we will see, carbon labour in TAMS was characterised by feelings of volatility in its widest sense. As carbon failed to materialise in any expected form, in turn, the project became conceptualised as a ‘scam’, or fitaka. Intangibility, social distance and obscurity will be presented as key traits of carbon as natural resource, as I analyse the infrastructures, labour regimes and forms of exchange and value production that were set up in order to ‘extract’ carbon in Mahatsara. Although carbon in this case is explicitly talked about, it appears as an elusive and hard-to-locate object, where its very existence is doubted, leading to feelings of deceit.